Professor Murray Gell-Mann is Distinguished Fellow and Co-Chairman of the Science Board at the Santa Fe Institute. He is also the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology. In 1969, he received the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. Professor Gell-Mann's "eightfold way" theory brought order to the chaos created by the discovery of some 100 particles in the atom's nucleus. Then he found that all of those particles, including the neutron and proton, are composed of fundamental building blocks that he named "quarks." The quarks are permanently confined by forces coming from the exchange of "gluons." He and others later constructed the quantum field theory of quarks and gluons, called "quantum chromodynamics," which seems to account for all the nuclear particles and their strong interactions.
Besides being a Nobel laureate, Prof. Gell-Mann has received the Ernest O. Lawrence Memorial Award of the Atomic Energy Commission, the Franklin Medal of the Franklin Institute, the Research Corporation Award, and the John J. Carty medal of the National Academy of Sciences. He has been awarded honorary doctoral degrees from many institutions, including Yale University, the University of Chicago, the University of Turin, Italy, and Oxford and Cambridge Universities in England. In 1988, he was listed on the United Nations Environmental Program Roll of Honor for Environmental Achievement (the Global 500).
Prof. Gell-Mann was an active member of the Caltech faculty from 1955 to 1993. He is a director of the J.D. and C.T. MacArthur Foundation, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a former Citizen Regent of the Smithsonian, 1974-1988, and a former member of the President's Science Advisory Committee, 1969-1972. He is now on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Although a theoretical physicist, Prof. Gell-Mann's interests extend to many other subjects, including natural history, historical linguistics, archaeology, history, and creative thinking, all subjects connected with biological evolution, cultural evolution, and learning and thinking. His recent research at the Santa Fe Institute has focused on the theory of complex adaptive systems, which brings all these areas of study together. He is also concerned about policy matters related to world environmental quality (including conservation of biological diversity), restraint in population growth, sustainable economic development, and stability of the world political system (including the strategic arms situation). He is a Founding Member of the Board of Trustees of the Santa Fe Institute (1982-present), and has been co-Chairman of its Science Board since 1985.
The University of Texas at Austin